Progress Report IV

Chapter 33 of Shining Dash is nearly complete, the story is now in the territory of being in the last few chapters-if anyone is interested in having more stories take place this particular continuity feel free to let me know as I've been kicking around a few ideas in my head, but I don't want to spend all of the time and energy writing them if there isn't much interest-I feel like that would be both pointless and obnoxious.

Chapter 9 of This Night Aria should also be coming soon, part of the reason for the temporary hiatus was because as I mentioned before-the story was only meant to be a single chapter toying with the idea of an aftermath-in retrospect, it was a mistake to continue due to others request when I didn't really have all that much planned out afterwards and still am uncertain as to what definitive end I want it to have.

The other reason for the hiatus is because the stress of trying to work on two on-going stories simultaneously was really getting to me and so I decided that both stories would ultimately be better off for it if I was able to give both of them my undivided attention, rather than try to jump back and forth between them.

Aside from the aforementioned possible follow-ups and prequels for Shining Dash (again, only if people are interested in them), I might post some One-shot stories...but, not for a contest-I learned that the hard way last year with my train-wreck of mostly 'meh' stories, I remember a critic who was reviewing them commented that they were all unremarkable as there was nothing really too memorable or meaningful behind them-which, I kind of have to agree with as they were all pretty lackluster in retrospect-one of them I wasn't even sure how to end so it dragged on to over 3,000 words.

So, if I write more of them I will try make sure they have more substance to them and avoid publishing any of them in the month of October, I swore off the One-Shotober after last year-that was when I became all too aware of how much the users and story approvers here truly hate the contest, stories, and those who write for the contest-if I was aware of the contest's negative reputation beforehand, I NEVER would have participated the second time-so I apologize to anyone I might have pissed off or offended for being a part of it.

Especially now that I know how much it pisses some people off-so October will have updates to multi-chapter stories, but ZERO One-shots published (even if they are already written), and am currently on the fence about submitting new stories in that month, because if I only have a single chapter written/published, then people who conveniently miss the 'Incomplete' status of the story could mistake it for a One-shot and I'm leading towards 'no' because that's a headache I'd rather not deal with.

I am assuming it is because the submission feed to be reviewed by story approvers gets clogged, the stories are lacking in quality because the participants are more concerned with quantity over quality to have written the most stories, which I can understand annoying readers as nobody likes to have their time wasted (unsurprisingly, my most popular story for it was one that I actually did research for to try to ensure as much medical accuracy as I could).

But, even if I were near 100% sure my stories were good quality (which I never am) I would rather play it safe this year.